Thursday, March 31, 2011

April Fool's Day - The Prank (A Bit of a Repost)

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It was 4:30 in the morning one year ago tomorrow that I woke up with a fiendishly clever idea. This idea was so brilliant that I couldn’t help but begin work and keep going until school was nearly ready to begin at 8:20. I wanted it to be awesome.

You see, one year ago tomorrow it was April Fool’s Day, and I had decided that I wanted to play a little prank on my class. I had never played a practical joke on my whole class before (at least that I can remember) and I thought that I’d do one this particular year.

Why? Just because.

So, I did a little research.
It seems that back in 1976 an astronomer, Patrick Alfred Moore, pulled a prank on BBC radio listeners. He stated that as Pluto passed behind Jupiter, it would cause decreased gravity temporarily on Earth.

Hundreds of people were completely faked out. It was brilliant.

I decided to recreate the hoax—after all—I’m all about keeping things green and recycling whenever possible. Also, this idea was much too good to NOT use.

I copied the HTML code from the Wikipedia as well as the NBC website. I put this code into Dreamweaver (my webpage creation software) and began to rewrite portions of the sites…after all I wanted it to look real.

I changed the dates, added information, and made the Wikipedia site not state anywhere in it that this was a hoax which happened in 1976, but rater a late-breaking story which had been on the 11 o’clock news the night before; therefore, many of the students may not yet had heard of it. Since these sites were not ‘live’ but rather clever imitations, I had to use only my computer.

I had these webpages already pulled up on the Promethean as the kids came in that morning and it went from there.

I could tell you all about the experience, explaining it brilliantly, but I think it would be better to show you what truly happened.

Just know that you are coming in about 5 minutes into the actual joke. I thought it a bit too long to keep the portion of ‘the setup’ about website accuracy, having multiple sources to check and recheck information, and the explanation about time zones.

I love it.

And yes, the parents all signed consent forms for this to be posted online; when it comes to embarrassing their offspring, it seems that parents are just awesome like that.

So, herein now lies the problem, tomorrow is yet another April Fool's Day...just how will I EVER be able to top this little prank?

I was actually just telling my coworkers about this joke you pulled yesterday. I actually came up with an AWESOME joke we are going to pull on the 6th graders tomorrow. I plan on posting it, so stay tuned.